The Governor has agreed to raid Hawaii's so-called "rainy day fund" to pay a $50 million ransom.

Meeting in secret November 20, the House and Senate Democratic caucuses have agreed to bring the Legislature into special session to make the raid possible--but only if the unions do their part.

The Hawaii Board of Education has agreed to raise bus fares and is considering cutting back expensive school transportation services--a key demand of Legislators who argued that the BoE had not done enough to trim its costs.

Now all eyes turn to the unions. Will they trade their hostages for the Governor's ransom payment?

Governor Lingle's proposal, now backed by the Legislature's willingness to call a special session, is to throw $50 million dollars of perfectly good money at the DoE. In exchange, the DoE, BoE, and HSTA must agree to use the $50 million as an excuse to eliminate 12 of the furlough days contained within the recently negotiated HSTA contract. The BoE and the HSTA must also agree to transfer the remaining 15 furlough days to non-instructional days. If agreed, no classroom time would be lost to furloughs from January 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011. The union would gain a contract with only 15 furlough days in a time period which originally called for 27.

Confronted this spring with a $468M DoE two-year budget cut, the HSTA, DoE, and BoE went straight to the "Washington Monument Gambit"--cutting the most sensitive and prominent services. Hawaiian style, this means the HSTA, DoE, and BoE conspired together to make furloughs as inconvenient as possible in order to pressure the Legislature for tax increases. Also targeted, high school athletics. Will they now settle for a one-time shot of $50 million?

The Advertiser, November 21 outlines excuses for demanding even more ransom or refusing to release all the hostages:

"As seasoned lawmakers, the Speaker of the House and the Senate President know how the process works," Okabe said in a statement. "When a formal proposal is made, we will evaluate the proposal and respond accordingly."

Okabe also dismissed concerns by state House Speaker Calvin Say, D-20th (St. Louis Heights, Palolo Valley, Wilhelmina Rise), that many teachers did not fully understand that furlough days would be taken away from classroom instruction when they ratified the two-year contract in September....

Several teachers, and some of their allies at the state Legislature, believe the public does not appreciate how important planning and collaboration days are when preparing for classroom instruction. The debate over furloughs has focused on the value of restoring the amount of classroom time for students rather than the quality of instruction.

School principals and other school staff — represented by the Hawaii Government Employees Association and the United Public Workers — may also have objections once it becomes known how they fit into a potential agreement. The HGEA has a two-year contract that includes furloughs, while the UPW is still in contract talks.

With these potential obstacles, the negotiations could leave more teacher furlough days in place, or break down altogether.

That's not very promising, but there's more. On November 20, The Advertiser reported:

Garrett Toguchi, the school board's chairman, said one of the issues under discussion is whether the $50 million out of the rainy day fund will be able to pay for 12 furlough days. He estimated it might be $10 million to $12 million short, since it costs about $5 million a day to operate the school system.

The DOE acknowledges an inability to conduct regular financial audits of the schools, and its chief financial officer expresses frustration over the DOE‘s antiquated systems.

"[W]e have great people, but not so good systems. … I cannot tell you how frustrating it is that I cannot give you the information you requested … and even more frustrating that requests that [Superintendent Hamamoto] sometimes makes for information cannot be fulfilled either."

One knowledgeable observer believes that the DOE is not trying to keep the public in the dark. According to him, "it‘s much worse than that". The truth, according to him, is that they have only a vague notion of what it costs to educate a student in a particular school, or how much of the operating budget actually gets to the classroom as opposed to being consumed by the bureaucracy. In other words, the DOE itself is in the dark. It‘s not a matter of bad people intending to do a bad job; instead, it‘s the predictable consequences of a governance system that lacks accountability.

The HGEA and the UPW are also demanding their cut of the ransom. KITV reports November 17:

Taking $50 million from the rainy day fund will cover basic school salaries, but Hamamoto said she might need more to cover expenses of opening schools. The superintendent also said that because many of the waiver days have already been used, it will not be possible to simply replace them with instructional days in the last six months of the school year.

State Senate President Colleen Hanabusa makes an important point about proposals to use $50 million from the state's rainy day fund to end school furloughs: Depleting the fund will make it more difficult to restore state services to the poor and needy that have been chopped in the recession.

Of course, "state services to the poor and needy" is just code for "HGEA jobs".

And finally HGEA President Jackie Ferguson-Miyamoto, in a November 17 Star-Bulletin commentary, seems to argue for a "global" solution which even maintains Hawaii's ACT 215/221 Hi-Tech cronies:

"During the 2009 legislative session, we advocated for a combination of solutions, which included budget cuts, tapping special funds, enacting early retirement legislation (not a monetary "incentive," but simply allow employees to retire early without penalty), and a temporary, modest increase to the general excise tax, which was also preferred by business groups, nonprofits, and some in the visitor and high-technology industries.

Will the HGEA demand some part of its platform also be included in any Legislative Special Session package? If the HSTA gets away with all of the $50 million ransom from the State, while the HGEA gets nothing, that would bode ill for the HGEA's position in the budget negotiations for next session beginning in January.

Teachers, and more importantly teachers union representatives, have to be willing to concede certain short-term points for the future of our children.

We hope the educators remember that they are in this field to help students learn and grow.

And so we urge the teachers, like the legislators, to do their part in making this two-pronged proposal a reality.

If you’re a teacher, and you don’t agree with that bargaining position, give your union rep a call and tell them to be a bit more reasonable in this critical time of need. Together, you are serving our children to equip them for success in life after school.

In this game of chicken, both sides need to back down, take a deep breath and realize that these macho maneuverings are punishing those who need our help the most.

One might conclude the Garden Isle didn't get the memo--but maybe that's because the union-Democrat amalgam doesn't have a memo to send out. They are still figuring out how to play this and KGI editors just forgot that no memo means no coverage.

The media has agreed to one thing: Bury discussion of the Lingle-Abercrombie proposal to make the DoE a Department of the next Governor's administration. In spite of Abercrombie's support, accountability is definitely not part of the union-Democrat playbook.